CHAPTER 13

The Ice Bank

THE NAUTILUS resumed its unruffled southbound heading. It went along

the 50th meridian with considerable speed. Would it go to the pole? I

didn’t think so, because every previous attempt to reach this spot on

the globe had failed. Besides, the season was already quite advanced,

since March 13 on Antarctic shores corresponds with September 13 in

the northernmost regions, which marks the beginning of the equinoctial

period.

On March 14 at latitude 55 degrees, I spotted floating ice, plain pale

bits of rubble twenty to twenty-five feet long, which formed reefs

over which the sea burst into foam. The Nautilus stayed on the surface

of the ocean. Having fished in the Arctic seas, Ned Land was already

familiar with the sight of icebergs. Conseil and I were marveling at

them for the first time.

In the sky toward the southern horizon, there stretched a dazzling

white band. English whalers have given this the name “ice blink.” No

matter how heavy the clouds may be, they can’t obscure this

phenomenon. It announces the presence of a pack, or shoal, of ice.

Indeed, larger blocks of ice soon appeared, their brilliance varying

at the whim of the mists. Some of these masses displayed green veins,

as if scrawled with undulating lines of copper sulfate. Others looked

like enormous amethysts, letting the light penetrate their

insides. The latter reflected the sun’s rays from the thousand facets

of their crystals. The former, tinted with a bright limestone sheen,

would have supplied enough building material to make a whole marble

town.

The farther down south we went, the more these floating islands grew

in numbers and prominence. Polar birds nested on them by the

thousands. These were petrels, cape pigeons, or puffins, and their

calls were deafening. Mistaking the Nautilus for the corpse of a

whale, some of them alighted on it and prodded its resonant sheet iron

with pecks of their beaks.

During this navigating in the midst of the ice, Captain Nemo often

stayed on the platform. He observed these deserted waterways

carefully. I saw his calm eyes sometimes perk up. In these polar seas

forbidden to man, did he feel right at home, the lord of these

unreachable regions? Perhaps. But he didn’t say. He stood still,

reviving only when his pilot’s instincts took over. Then, steering his

Nautilus with consummate dexterity, he skillfully dodged the masses of

ice, some of which measured several miles in length, their heights

varying from seventy to eighty meters. Often the horizon seemed

completely closed off. Abreast of latitude 60 degrees, every

passageway had disappeared. Searching with care, Captain Nemo soon

found a narrow opening into which he brazenly slipped, well aware,

however, that it would close behind him.

Guided by his skillful hands, the Nautilus passed by all these

different masses of ice, which are classified by size and shape with a

precision that enraptured Conseil: “icebergs,” or mountains; “ice

fields,” or smooth, limitless tracts; “drift ice,” or floating floes;

“packs,” or broken tracts, called “patches” when they’re circular and

“streams” when they form long strips.

The temperature was fairly low. Exposed to the outside air, the

thermometer marked -2 degrees to -3 degrees centigrade. But we were

warmly dressed in furs, for which seals and aquatic bears had paid the

price. Evenly heated by all its electric equipment, the Nautilus’s

interior defied the most intense cold. Moreover, to find a bearable

temperature, the ship had only to sink just a few meters beneath the

waves.

Two months earlier we would have enjoyed perpetual daylight in this

latitude; but night already fell for three or four hours, and later it

would cast six months of shadow over these circumpolar regions.

On March 15 we passed beyond the latitude of the South Shetland and

South Orkney Islands. The captain told me that many tribes of seals

used to inhabit these shores; but English and American whalers, in a

frenzy of destruction, slaughtered all the adults, including pregnant

females, and where life and activity once existed, those fishermen

left behind only silence and death.

Going along the 55th meridian, the Nautilus cut the Antarctic Circle

on March 16 near eight o’clock in the morning. Ice completely

surrounded us and closed off the horizon. Nevertheless, Captain Nemo

went from passageway to passageway, always proceeding south.

“But where’s he going?” I asked.

“Straight ahead,” Conseil replied. “Ultimately, when he can’t go any

farther, he’ll stop.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it!” I replied.

And in all honesty, I confess that this venturesome excursion was far

from displeasing to me. I can’t express the intensity of my amazement

at the beauties of these new regions. The ice struck superb

poses. Here, its general effect suggested an oriental town with

countless minarets and mosques. There, a city in ruins, flung to the

ground by convulsions in the earth. These views were varied

continuously by the sun’s oblique rays, or were completely swallowed

up by gray mists in the middle of blizzards. Then explosions,

cave-ins, and great iceberg somersaults would occur all around us,

altering the scenery like the changing landscape in a diorama.

If the Nautilus was submerged during these losses of balance, we heard

the resulting noises spread under the waters with frightful intensity,

and the collapse of these masses created daunting eddies down to the

ocean’s lower strata. The Nautilus then rolled and pitched like a ship

left to the fury of the elements.

Often, no longer seeing any way out, I thought we were imprisoned for

good, but Captain Nemo, guided by his instincts, discovered new

passageways from the tiniest indications. He was never wrong when he

observed slender threads of bluish water streaking through these ice

fields. Accordingly, I was sure that he had already risked his

Nautilus in the midst of the Antarctic seas.

However, during the day of March 16, these tracts of ice completely

barred our path. It wasn’t the Ice Bank as yet, just huge ice fields

cemented together by the cold. This obstacle couldn’t stop Captain

Nemo, and he launched his ship against the ice fields with hideous

violence. The Nautilus went into these brittle masses like a wedge,

splitting them with dreadful cracklings. It was an old-fashioned

battering ram propelled with infinite power. Hurled aloft, ice rubble

fell back around us like hail. Through brute force alone, the

submersible carved out a channel for itself. Carried away by its

momentum, the ship sometimes mounted on top of these tracts of ice and

crushed them with its weight, or at other times, when cooped up

beneath the ice fields, it split them with simple pitching movements,

creating wide punctures.

Violent squalls assaulted us during the daytime. Thanks to certain

heavy mists, we couldn’t see from one end of the platform to the

other. The wind shifted abruptly to every point on the compass. The

snow was piling up in such packed layers, it had to be chipped loose

with blows from picks. Even in a temperature of merely -5 degrees

centigrade, every outside part of the Nautilus was covered with ice. A

ship’s rigging would have been unusable, because all its tackle would

have jammed in the grooves of the pulleys. Only a craft without sails,

driven by an electric motor that needed no coal, could face such high

latitudes.

Under these conditions the barometer generally stayed quite low. It

fell as far as 73.5 centimeters. Our compass indications no longer

offered any guarantees. The deranged needles would mark contradictory

directions as we approached the southern magnetic pole, which doesn’t

coincide with the South Pole proper. In fact, according to the

astronomer Hansteen, this magnetic pole is located fairly close to

latitude 70 degrees and longitude 130 degrees, or abiding by the

observations of Louis-Isidore Duperrey, in longitude 135 degrees and

latitude 70 degrees 30′. Hence we had to transport compasses to

different parts of the ship, take many readings, and strike an

average. Often we could chart our course only by guesswork, a less

than satisfactory method in the midst of these winding passageways

whose landmarks change continuously.

At last on March 18, after twenty futile assaults, the Nautilus was

decisively held in check. No longer was it an ice stream, patch, or

field—it was an endless, immovable barrier formed by ice mountains

fused to each other.

“The Ice Bank!” the Canadian told me.

For Ned Land, as well as for every navigator before us, I knew that

this was the great insurmountable obstacle. When the sun appeared for

an instant near noon, Captain Nemo took a reasonably accurate sight

that gave our position as longitude 51 degrees 30′ and latitude 67

degrees 39′ south. This was a position already well along in these

Antarctic regions.

As for the liquid surface of the sea, there was no longer any

semblance of it before our eyes. Before the Nautilus’s spur there lay

vast broken plains, a tangle of confused chunks with all the

helter-skelter unpredictability typical of a river’s surface a short

while before its ice breakup; but in this case the proportions were

gigantic. Here and there stood sharp peaks, lean spires that rose as

high as 200 feet; farther off, a succession of steeply cut cliffs

sporting a grayish tint, huge mirrors that reflected the sparse rays

of a sun half drowned in mist. Beyond, a stark silence reigned in this

desolate natural setting, a silence barely broken by the flapping

wings of petrels or puffins. By this point everything was frozen, even

sound.

So the Nautilus had to halt in its venturesome course among these

tracts of ice.

“Sir,” Ned Land told me that day, “if your captain goes any farther

. . .”

“Yes?”

“He’ll be a superman.”

“How so, Ned?”

“Because nobody can clear the Ice Bank. Your captain’s a powerful man,

but damnation, he isn’t more powerful than nature. If she draws a

boundary line, there you stop, like it or not!”

“Correct, Ned Land, but I still want to know what’s behind this Ice

Bank! Behold my greatest source of irritation—a wall!”

“Master is right,” Conseil said. “Walls were invented simply to

frustrate scientists. All walls should be banned.”

“Fine!” the Canadian put in. “But we already know what’s behind this

Ice Bank.”

“What?” I asked.

“Ice, ice, and more ice.”

“You may be sure of that, Ned,” I answered, “but I’m not. That’s why I

want to see for myself.”

“Well, professor,” the Canadian replied, “you can just drop that idea!

You’ve made it to the Ice Bank, which is already far enough, but you

won’t get any farther, neither your Captain Nemo or his Nautilus. And

whether he wants to or not, we’ll head north again, in other words, to

the land of sensible people.”

I had to agree that Ned Land was right, and until ships are built to

navigate over tracts of ice, they’ll have to stop at the Ice Bank.

Indeed, despite its efforts, despite the powerful methods it used to

split this ice, the Nautilus was reduced to immobility. Ordinarily,

when someone can’t go any farther, he still has the option of

returning in his tracks. But here it was just as impossible to turn

back as to go forward, because every passageway had closed behind us,

and if our submersible remained even slightly stationary, it would be

frozen in without delay. Which is exactly what happened near two

o’clock in the afternoon, and fresh ice kept forming over the ship’s

sides with astonishing speed. I had to admit that Captain Nemo’s

leadership had been most injudicious.

Just then I was on the platform. Observing the situation for some

while, the captain said to me:

“Well, professor! What think you?”

“I think we’re trapped, captain.”

“Trapped! What do you mean?”

“I mean we can’t go forward, backward, or sideways. I think that’s the

standard definition of ‘trapped,’ at least in the civilized world.”

“So, Professor Aronnax, you think the Nautilus won’t be able to float

clear?”

“Only with the greatest difficulty, captain, since the season is

already too advanced for you to depend on an ice breakup.”

“Oh, professor,” Captain Nemo replied in an ironic tone, “you never

change! You see only impediments and obstacles! I promise you, not

only will the Nautilus float clear, it will go farther still!”

“Farther south?” I asked, gaping at the captain.

“Yes, sir, it will go to the pole.”

“To the pole!” I exclaimed, unable to keep back a movement of

disbelief.

“Yes,” the captain replied coolly, “the Antarctic pole, that unknown

spot crossed by every meridian on the globe. As you know, I do

whatever I like with my Nautilus.”

Yes, I did know that! I knew this man was daring to the point of being

foolhardy. But to overcome all the obstacles around the South

Pole—even more unattainable than the North Pole, which still hadn’t

been reached by the boldest navigators—wasn’t this an absolutely

insane undertaking, one that could occur only in the brain of a

madman?

It then dawned on me to ask Captain Nemo if he had already discovered

this pole, which no human being had ever trod underfoot.

“No, sir,” he answered me, “but we’ll discover it together. Where

others have failed, I’ll succeed. Never before has my Nautilus cruised

so far into these southernmost seas, but I repeat: it will go farther

still.”

“I’d like to believe you, captain,” I went on in a tone of some

sarcasm. “Oh I do believe you! Let’s forge ahead! There are no

obstacles for us! Let’s shatter this Ice Bank! Let’s blow it up, and

if it still resists, let’s put wings on the Nautilus and fly over it!”

“Over it, professor?” Captain Nemo replied serenely. “No, not over it,

but under it.”

“Under it!” I exclaimed.

A sudden insight into Captain Nemo’s plans had just flashed through my

mind. I understood. The marvelous talents of his Nautilus would be put

to work once again in this superhuman undertaking!

“I can see we’re starting to understand each other, professor,”

Captain Nemo told me with a half smile. “You already glimpse the

potential—myself, I’d say the success—of this attempt. Maneuvers that

aren’t feasible for an ordinary ship are easy for the Nautilus. If a

continent emerges at the pole, we’ll stop at that continent. But on

the other hand, if open sea washes the pole, we’ll go to that very

place!”

“Right,” I said, carried away by the captain’s logic. “Even though the

surface of the sea has solidified into ice, its lower strata are still

open, thanks to that divine justice that puts the maximum density of

salt water one degree above its freezing point. And if I’m not

mistaken, the submerged part of this Ice Bank is in a four-to-one

ratio to its emerging part.”

“Very nearly, professor. For each foot of iceberg above the sea, there

are three more below. Now then, since these ice mountains don’t exceed

a height of 100 meters, they sink only to a depth of 300 meters. And

what are 300 meters to the Nautilus?”

“A mere nothing, sir.”

“We could even go to greater depths and find that temperature layer

common to all ocean water, and there we’d brave with impunity the -30

degrees or -40 degrees cold on the surface.”

“True, sir, very true,” I replied with growing excitement.

“Our sole difficulty,” Captain Nemo went on, “lies in our staying

submerged for several days without renewing our air supply.”

“That’s all?” I answered. “The Nautilus has huge air tanks; we’ll fill

them up and they’ll supply all the oxygen we need.”

“Good thinking, Professor Aronnax,” the captain replied with a

smile. “But since I don’t want to be accused of foolhardiness, I’m

giving you all my objections in advance.”

“You have more?”

“Just one. If a sea exists at the South Pole, it’s possible this sea

may be completely frozen over, so we couldn’t come up to the surface!”

“My dear sir, have you forgotten that the Nautilus is armed with a

fearsome spur? Couldn’t it be launched diagonally against those tracts

of ice, which would break open from the impact?”

“Ah, professor, you’re full of ideas today!”

“Besides, captain,” I added with still greater enthusiasm, “why

wouldn’t we find open sea at the South Pole just as at the North Pole?

The cold-temperature poles and the geographical poles don’t coincide

in either the northern or southern hemispheres, and until proof to the

contrary, we can assume these two spots on the earth feature either a

continent or an ice-free ocean.”

“I think as you do, Professor Aronnax,” Captain Nemo replied. “I’ll

only point out that after raising so many objections against my plan,

you’re now crushing me under arguments in its favor.”

Captain Nemo was right. I was outdoing him in daring! It was I who was

sweeping him to the pole. I was leading the way, I was out in front

. . . but no, you silly fool! Captain Nemo already knew the pros and

cons of this question, and it amused him to see you flying off into

impossible fantasies!

Nevertheless, he didn’t waste an instant. At his signal, the chief

officer appeared. The two men held a quick exchange in their

incomprehensible language, and either the chief officer had been

alerted previously or he found the plan feasible, because he showed no

surprise.

But as unemotional as he was, he couldn’t have been more impeccably

emotionless than Conseil when I told the fine lad our intention of

pushing on to the South Pole. He greeted my announcement with the

usual “As master wishes,” and I had to be content with that. As for

Ned Land, no human shoulders ever executed a higher shrug than the

pair belonging to our Canadian.

“Honestly, sir,” he told me. “You and your Captain Nemo, I pity you

both!”

“But we will go to the pole, Mr. Land.”

“Maybe, but you won’t come back!”

And Ned Land reentered his cabin, “to keep from doing something

desperate,” he said as he left me.

Meanwhile preparations for this daring attempt were getting under

way. The Nautilus’s powerful pumps forced air down into the tanks and

stored it under high pressure. Near four o’clock Captain Nemo informed

me that the platform hatches were about to be closed. I took a last

look at the dense Ice Bank we were going to conquer. The weather was

fair, the skies reasonably clear, the cold quite brisk, namely -12

degrees centigrade; but after the wind had lulled, this temperature

didn’t seem too unbearable.

Equipped with picks, some ten men climbed onto the Nautilus’s sides

and cracked loose the ice around the ship’s lower plating, which was

soon set free. This operation was swiftly executed because the fresh

ice was still thin. We all reentered the interior. The main ballast

tanks were filled with the water that hadn’t yet congealed at our line

of flotation. The Nautilus submerged without delay.

I took a seat in the lounge with Conseil. Through the open window we

stared at the lower strata of this southernmost ocean. The thermometer

rose again. The needle on the pressure gauge swerved over its dial.

About 300 meters down, just as Captain Nemo had predicted, we cruised

beneath the undulating surface of the Ice Bank. But the Nautilus sank

deeper still. It reached a depth of 800 meters. At the surface this

water gave a temperature of -12 degrees centigrade, but now it gave no

more than -10 degrees. Two degrees had already been gained. Thanks to

its heating equipment, the Nautilus’s temperature, needless to say,

stayed at a much higher degree. Every maneuver was accomplished with

extraordinary precision.

“With all due respect to master,” Conseil told me, “we’ll pass it by.”

“I fully expect to!” I replied in a tone of deep conviction.

Now in open water, the Nautilus took a direct course to the pole

without veering from the 52nd meridian. From 67 degrees 30′ to 90

degrees, twenty-two and a half degrees of latitude were left to cross,

in other words, slightly more than 500 leagues. The Nautilus adopted

an average speed of twenty-six miles per hour, the speed of an express

train. If it kept up this pace, forty hours would do it for reaching

the pole.

For part of the night, the novelty of our circumstances kept Conseil

and me at the lounge window. The sea was lit by our beacon’s electric

rays. But the depths were deserted. Fish didn’t linger in these

imprisoned waters. Here they found merely a passageway for going from

the Antarctic Ocean to open sea at the pole. Our progress was

swift. You could feel it in the vibrations of the long steel hull.

Near two o’clock in the morning, I went to snatch a few hours of

sleep. Conseil did likewise. I didn’t encounter Captain Nemo while

going down the gangways. I assumed that he was keeping to the

pilothouse.

The next day, March 19, at five o’clock in the morning, I was back at

my post in the lounge. The electric log indicated that the Nautilus

had reduced speed. By then it was rising to the surface, but

cautiously, while slowly emptying its ballast tanks.

My heart was pounding. Would we emerge into the open and find the

polar air again?

No. A jolt told me that the Nautilus had bumped the underbelly of the

Ice Bank, still quite thick to judge from the hollowness of the

accompanying noise. Indeed, we had “struck bottom,” to use nautical

terminology, but in the opposite direction and at a depth of 3,000

feet. That gave us 4,000 feet of ice overhead, of which 1,000 feet

emerged above water. So the Ice Bank was higher here than we had found

it on the outskirts. A circumstance less than encouraging.

Several times that day, the Nautilus repeated the same experiment and

always it bumped against this surface that formed a ceiling above

it. At certain moments the ship encountered ice at a depth of 900

meters, denoting a thickness of 1,200 meters, of which 300 meters rose

above the level of the ocean. This height had tripled since the moment

the Nautilus had dived beneath the waves.

I meticulously noted these different depths, obtaining the underwater

profile of this upside-down mountain chain that stretched beneath the

sea.

By evening there was still no improvement in our situation. The ice

stayed between 400 and 500 meters deep. It was obviously shrinking,

but what a barrier still lay between us and the surface of the ocean!

By then it was eight o’clock. The air inside the Nautilus should have

been renewed four hours earlier, following daily practice on

board. But I didn’t suffer very much, although Captain Nemo hadn’t yet

made demands on the supplementary oxygen in his air tanks.

That night my sleep was fitful. Hope and fear besieged me by turns. I

got up several times. The Nautilus continued groping. Near three

o’clock in the morning, I observed that we encountered the Ice Bank’s

underbelly at a depth of only fifty meters. So only 150 feet separated

us from the surface of the water. Little by little the Ice Bank was

turning into an ice field again. The mountains were changing back into

plains.

My eyes didn’t leave the pressure gauge. We kept rising on a diagonal,

going along this shiny surface that sparkled beneath our electric

rays. Above and below, the Ice Bank was subsiding in long

gradients. Mile after mile it was growing thinner.

Finally, at six o’clock in the morning on that memorable day of March

19, the lounge door opened. Captain Nemo appeared.

“Open sea!” he told me.